Marlene Dumas at MoMA

Have you ever been at work and talked with someone who worked in another department and realized that your department and his/her department were kind of like the proverbial two hands that don't know what the other is doing? That's a little bit like what it's like to move from the fun, feminine Rist installation to the dark, depressing Dumas installation --- a difference of four floors and an entire spectrum of tone.

This is not an exhibit for the faint of heart.


Dumas's smallish portraits, painted from photos of friends and family, are brutal and carnal. Even the exhibit's title --- Measuring Your Own Grave --- causes distress. Children are naked, with paint-splattered hands, their genitals at the viewer's eye level. Adults look stunned and swollen. Blues, grays, and blacks predominate, in the drippy style of a kid's watercolor. What was particularly chilling was the way Rist's music floated from the atrium to the sixth floor, totally changing in tenor as it traveled: downstairs the music seemed like part of a really cool rave; upstairs the music was funereal and soft.

Maybe Rist is right. Maybe much of the art made in the past 100 or so years requires meditation, relaxation, preparation. But Dumas herself is arguably reacting to her own version of the canon, in particular the abstract work that so dominated the late 20th-century art world. At any rate, here's something to think about: there are two special exhibitions by women at MoMA right now. Maybe those hands understand each other after all.